nuclear

As though it wasn’t bad enough already. The NY Times reports that the meltdown may have already escaped containment and begun boring through the concrete floor, according to a computer simulation of the original accident.

Soon after an earthquake and a tsunami on March 11 knocked out cooling systems at the power plant, nuclear fuel rods in three of its six reactors overheated and slumped, the operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, has said.

How much energy? you ask. Well, the researchers based their estimates on what current technology is able to extract – not any hypothetical future advances. Even so, it turns out that there is three million megawatts of potential geothermal energy below the surface of the United States. That’s ten times the energy of every coal plant in the United States online today.